There is a tremendous wealth of evidence supporting the importance of wellbeing in the workplace, and with Covid-19 continually reshaping how we work and where we work, with significant impact on employee wellbeing, we are seeing accelerated trends in workplace well-being. What was previously seen by some HR and Health & Safety practitioners as a challenge to get board buy-in, has rapidly moved up the corporate agenda, with many senior leaders placing the health and wellbeing of their workforce at the top of their priorities.
We are also seeing a growing desire to ensure that wellbeing interventions are relevant to the organisation – which means they are informed, based on credible and robust data. As former chief medical officer Sally Davies cautioned against back in 2013, ‘well-being interventions shouldn’t be carried out without understanding the issues they seek to alleviate’. After all, leaders don’t make business decisions based on uninformed data. We know that our people are instrumental to the success of any business, so why should the decisions we make around employee wellbeing be based on anything other than informed data?
Data is also vital to help us understand what we are trying to address in our wellbeing programmes. Is this about improving work organisation and job design? Is it about promoting healthy behaviours – if so, what are we addressing? Is it about improving the identification and management of work-stress? Optimising attendance management, rehabilitation and return to work? Or some or all of the above?
Data can inform the right intervention and support infrastructure for a business – and when we think about the support infrastructure, we need to include our employees, managers and our leaders – because everyone – not just the helplines, the wellbeing interventions or the health-related insurances – play an equally important role in a workplace wellbeing support infrastructure.
Only once an organisation has the right, robust data informing their wellbeing programme design – and have optimised the measures behind what drives that data – can they effectively monitor, review and refine their ongoing programme and align employee wellbeing to bottom-line.
Getting your data right starts by having a robust approach to assessment. Both at an organisational level (what policies, procedures and practices are currently in place? How consistently are they applied/ adhered to? How informed and relevant are they to your business? What data is currently captured and how robust is that data?). Also, how robust are the measures behind what drives your data? For example, if your absence policies and procedures are not consistently applied, this should be factored in the weighting given to the credibility of the data in informing your overall approach (of course, in this situation, optimising your attendance management should be one of your wellbeing programme design priorities!)
Second, from an employee perspective. How ‘well’ are your employees? How informed and robust is the data supporting this? Are you looking at single or multiple sources of data? How frequently are you looking at the data? Who is analysing the data?
Let’s also remember our duty of care – employee mental health and wellbeing is covered in various legislation, which if a business fails to comply with, they could face risk of a tribunal (such as disability discrimination claims, health & safety issues such as stress claims, or personal injury claims e.g. psychological injury). Under the 1999 Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations, employers have a duty to assess the risk of stress-related ill health arising from work activities – and under the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act, to take measures to control that risk. There are various ways of capturing this information – from individual 1-2-1 stress risk assessments, to site/ project risk assessments, to group-wide employee surveys.
If you are already using employee surveys, think about how holistic and comprehensive are they. Do they identify and measure the impact of the key drivers of workplace wellbeing?; are they sufficiently meeting the requirements of the aforementioned regulations?); are they designed to enable ease of benchmarking against existing survey question sets?; do you have methods in place to enable you to explore themes and outputs of surveys with employees and drill down into particular areas (e.g. focus groups or employee representative groups?).
The more information we have – but importantly, the more holistic a picture we have looking at multiple data sets – the more informed and relevant workplace wellbeing programmes become.
Stephen Haynes is the head of programme for Mates in Mind, a leading workplace mental health charity. Mates in Mind works with nearly 500 employers, helping to optimise mental health at work by providing tools, resources, awareness and skills.
